Peerless Beauty – Chapter 115
by Little PandaWith You
Spending a lifetime together
During her time in Beijing, Lu Yinxi didn’t contact Jian Qing. Firstly, because she was too busy, and secondly, she wanted to give herself some time to plan her future.
In the virtual world, Jian Qing had once asked her about her plans for the future. At that time, she couldn’t answer. Now, she could submit an answer sheet for Jian Qing to review.
She first came out to her team, telling them about her sexual orientation.
As a celebrity, every move is put under a magnifying glass, observed from 360 degrees without blind spots. Her team members, who had accompanied her through years of ups and downs, were colleagues and more importantly, partners. Both emotionally and rationally, she needed to inform them—
“I like women. I’m a lesbian.”
The manager’s jaw dropped in surprise.
The publicity team member slapped the table and exclaimed, “Did someone catch photos or videos of you in bed with a girl?”
Lu Yinxi’s face turned slightly red as she gently closed her manager’s mouth and shook her head at the publicity team member: “No, I’m just coming out to you all.”
The publicity team member patted their chest in relief: “That’s good. As long as there’s no bedding involved, I can spin any confession, hug, or kiss into just a close female friendship.”
Lu Yinxi burst into laughter.
In their circle, there were quite a few celebrities who were eating both men and women (bisexual). However, given the overall environment in the country, when paparazzi caught something, they would usually give a heads up to the celebrity’s team and make a deal, not easily exposing anyone. Otherwise, it would be tantamount to cutting off someone’s financial path.
People in any industry wouldn’t easily do things that seriously offend others.
Unless there’s a grudge.
Between women, any ambiguity could almost always be explained away as close friendship.
Although this path was difficult to walk, as long as two people were of one heart and worked together, there was nothing too difficult.
The manager pinched her cheek and asked, “Is it because we’ve never let you date guys, and it’s made you repressed?”
Lu Yinxi swatted away her hand, rubbed her cheek, and defended herself: “No, I’ve always been more likely to be attracted to girls!”
From a young age, she had never been interested in the opposite sex. Later, when the company and team explicitly forbade her from dating men, she didn’t mind at all.
The assistant said with certainty: “Sister Yinxi, you must have been dating someone behind our backs? Last time, I saw you looking all lost and dejected like you’d just been dumped.”
The publicity team member immediately took out a small notebook to take notes: “It’s a woman, right? What does she do? Is she in the industry or outside? How did you meet? Is the relationship stable?”
A series of questions needed to be reported and prepared for, to prevent being caught off guard if the media were to expose anything.
Lu Yinxi organized her thoughts: “She’s not in the industry, she’s a doctor. We’re not exactly dating, we were together before, but we’ve been apart for a while. We’re not officially together now. As for how we met, how should I put this… I guess you could say we met in the virtual world…”
“Good gracious, we guarded against everything on set and at the company, but we never thought to guard against you having an online romance!” The assistant’s face showed the pain of “my cabbage has been rooted up” (someone or something precious has been taken away).
Online romance… that was pretty close… It could be considered an online romance in the holographic world, and now it was in the process of meeting in real life after an online relationship.
Lu Yinxi was lost in thought for a moment, then nodded and said, “You could call it an online romance. We were apart online for a while, and now I’ve gone offline to find her.”
“You were even the proactive one!” The assistant became even more distressed.
This mistress of theirs was someone they had always treated like “holding in the palm for fear of dropping, and kept in the mouth for fear of melting” (to treat someone with extreme care and protection). How could she be proactive!
Lu Yinxi still wore a cheerful and happy smile: “She’s really, really good, extremely good. What’s wrong with me being a bit proactive?”
Besides, in the past, Jian Qing had been the more emotionally proactive one, while she had been the one avoiding it.
Everyone looked at her with faces that said “beyond help”.
The assistant looked at the manager: “Sister, this kid is deeply infatuated with her relationship!”
The manager held her forehead and said: “It’s okay, the relationship isn’t too stable yet. We still have a chance to beat the mandarin ducks with a stick (to break up the couple).”
Hearing that she wanted to break them up, Lu Yinxi urgently said: “Even if the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu) were alive, she couldn’t separate us!”
The manager patted her head: “You’re such an inexperienced kid. Whether it’s same-sex or opposite-sex, I don’t have high hopes for relationships between people inside and outside the industry. You’re simply not from the same world, your circles are completely different, and it’s very easy to break up. Even for people within the industry, look at how many divorces there are every year, with everyone doing their own thing?”
Lu Yinxi just smiled without speaking.
Speaking of not being from the same world, in her previous understanding, she had thought they weren’t from the same world.
Back then, they had the courage to stand together and face everything. There was no reason why, in reality, they should now retreat three steps (to back off).
They had walked through the four seasons together in a strange world. Now, Jian Qing had forgotten it all.
These days, Jian Qing had been constantly sharing updates on her WeChat Moments. Whenever she carved something, she would post it, her words revealing a hint of pride, feeling that she was self-taught and naturally skilled.
Lu Yinxi decided to challenge her confidence a bit. She posted an update visible only to Jian Qing, featuring Nalan Xingde’s 《Long Lasting Lovesickness》 (a classical Chinese poem), asking her to guess.
【Mountains one journey, waters one journey,
The body moves towards Yuguan on the other side.
In the deep night, thousands of tents are lit.
Wind after wind, snow after snow,
Shattering the dreams of a homesick heart.
My old garden lacks these sounds.】
This poem expresses the homesickness of a soldier on a frontier military expedition.
Lu Yinxi had learned this “ci” (a type of classical Chinese poetry) since childhood, but only today did she truly and deeply understand the longing for home expressed in the poem while drifting in a foreign land and dreaming of returning to one’s native soil.
On many nights recently, she would often wake up startled in the middle of the night, dreaming of people and events from that world.
She dreamed that Lan Zhou and Chu Yan had gotten engaged; dreamed that Jian Qing’s sister, Jian Yan, had received a charitable donation made in her name by Jian Qing, and she was searching everywhere for Jian Qing’s whereabouts; dreamed that Wei Mingming said she could no longer contact her mentor…
She wasn’t sure if these were just dreams, or if they were things truly happening in that world.
In any case, it had nothing to do with them anymore.
She and Jian Qing had both disappeared from that world, and Jian Qing wasn’t even a person from that world to begin with.
No wonder she had always been detached from the crowd, unable to integrate…
Jian Qing saw the poem shared by Lu Yinxi and pondered for a while, but couldn’t figure out its meaning.
She searched online, looked up references, and read various interpretations, only to learn that it expressed homesickness.
It turned out that after she had shared her wood carvings for so many days, this person hadn’t paid attention at all, but was just single-mindedly thinking of home.
She stopped sharing.
But she continued carving wood.
Wood carving had become her hobby in her spare time.
After a week of not seeing Jian Qing share any wood carvings, Lu Yinxi hugged her phone, constantly refreshing for updates, unable to help wondering if she had been blocked.
Surely not, right? It was just a poem she shared, after all.
Lu Yinxi quickly shared several newly released diagnostic and treatment guidelines from the oncology field, to show her interest in medicine and prove that she wasn’t some sentimental and melancholic artistic youth.
Jian Qing remained silent, so she took the initiative to send Jian Qing a message.
【Doctor Jian, good evening. Have you been carving wood recently?】
Jian Qing maintained her composure for a minute, then sent Lu Yinxi pictures of her newly carved little deer, rabbit, and gourd.
Lu Yinxi, lying on her bed, propped her chin with one hand while typing with the other:
【That’s amazing! [awesome][awesome][awesome]】
She sent three thumbs-up emojis to encourage Jian Qing, then asked: 【Why do you always carve little deer? [shy]】
The little deer was the animal Jian Qing was most skilled at carving. In that world, her first finished piece was a rough little deer.
She didn’t expect Jian Qing to say something like “because of you,” but hoped to see a subtle answer like “the feel is familiar” or “I don’t know why, I just want to carve this.”
Jian Qing saw Lu Yinxi’s message and sent her a picture of the pattern paper:
【The other animals on the pattern paper you gave me were cut off, only this elk remains. I learned to carve the rabbit and gourd by watching videos.】
Lu Yinxi: …
Couldn’t she sense that this was a little surprise she had prepared for her?
【I’m going to take a shower.】
Lu Yinxi didn’t want to continue chatting with her and ended the conversation using the shower as an excuse.
After returning from her shower, with Jian Qing’s image still lingering in her mind, Lu Yinxi resigned herself to fate and went to chat with Jian Qing again.
She only intended to send a text message, but accidentally tapped the voice call button. As she hurriedly tried to end the call, it was instantly connected.
Lu Yinxi froze, not knowing what to say for a moment.
She guessed that the person on the other end of the phone was also stunned.
For a good while, no one spoke, and only a rustling sound could be heard.
Lu Yinxi coughed once, cleared her throat, and said, “Teacher Jian, good evening. I accidentally tapped the call button.”
“Okay,” Jian Qing responded faintly, “I also accidentally touched it.”
Lu Yinxi laughed softly and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Carving wood.”
“What are you carving this time?”
“Ginkgo leaves,” Jian Qing answered softly.
“Why carve ginkgo leaves? The streets in my hometown are full of them.”
This time Jian Qing didn’t answer.
Lu Yinxi’s hometown had many ginkgo trees planted.
She missed her hometown, so Jian Qing wanted to carve some leaves from her hometown to give to her.
Lu Yinxi was used to Jian Qing’s silence. When this question went unanswered, she changed the topic.
With questions and answers back and forth, they chatted late into the night. As Lu Yinxi gradually grew drowsy, she fell asleep listening to the “ca ca” sound of the wood being carved.
“Sometimes, to cure; often, to help; always, to comfort.”
Another batch of interns came to the oncology department for a “viewing flowers while riding a horse” (a hurried and superficial experience) rotation.
The intern looked up at the slogan in the Oncology Ward 2 office and read it softly.
As the year-end approached, the director of the Medical Affairs Department came down to the clinical departments for inspection, repeatedly emphasizing the importance of ensuring medical quality and adhering to the eighteen core medical systems. Seeing the new interns and trainees, he couldn’t help but say a few more words—
“In practicing medicine, you’re standing with one foot in the clinic and one foot in the court. When you start clinical work, first learn to protect yourself. When you encounter issues, ask your supervisors, even if you might get scolded. Don’t act on your own. When you’re young, don’t be afraid of making mistakes or being scolded. Sometimes, not being scolded by your supervisor or superior means you’ll be scolded worse by patients or their families.
Of course, don’t incite conflicts between doctors and patients. There are still many simple and kind common people, but when you walk the night road often enough, you’re bound to encounter some difficult and unreasonable ones.
When you meet difficult people, try to respond calmly and don’t provoke them. You are scholars, they are soldiers. When a scholar meets a soldier, reason can’t prevail.
Make sure to report to your superior doctors and the Medical Affairs Department early. If you report, when something happens, the responsibility on you will be shared and lessened. We have a department director who’s very smart; he often reports to us saying, ‘We have a patient in our department who’s like this and that, might be troublesome, likely to cause issues.’ This way, we can intervene early, control risks in advance for any potential problems or difficult situations…”
The students nodded repeatedly as they listened.
After the Medical Affairs Director left with a crowd of people, the oncology department secretary introduced the department to the interns: “Our oncology discipline requires lifelong learning. Even now, we have weekly academic studies to absorb the latest international research results. It’s not something you can master in a few weeks or months and use for a lifetime. If you thoroughly learn oncology knowledge, when you rotate to other internal medicine departments in the future, you might find them relatively simple. Oncology knowledge grows as cancer grows, and you have to learn accordingly. The content of other disciplines will become part of your knowledge system. For those who like challenging themselves and continuous learning, welcome to apply for graduate studies in oncology…”
For the soon-to-graduate students, subject knowledge and lifelong learning seemed too abstract. Whether they could make money and find good employment were their primary concerns.
After introducing the department, the secretary began assigning groups to the students.
Jian Qing’s group was assigned two interns and one trainee.
Every year, batch after batch of students came, and she couldn’t remember so many names, so she uniformly called them classmate.
The junior colleague responsible for guiding the interns/trainees had gone out for a consultation, and these new students were looking expectantly at Jian Qing.
Jian Qing tossed each of them a copy of 《Eighteen Core Medical Systems》: “Read and memorize this first. When your supervisor returns, he’ll take you on rounds.”
It had been a long time since she personally guided interns/trainees, and as she handed them the materials, a sense of familiarity welled up.
It seemed she had treated someone this way before.
She was lost in thought for a moment.
The head nurse walked in with wind beneath her feet (quickly and energetically), excitedly announcing some news: “A celebrity has donated a piano to our department through the Red Cross. The people from the Red Cross said that volunteers will come to our ward every week to play the piano!”
“Which celebrity? How generous!”
“I’m not too familiar with the name, you young people might know better. I think her name is… Lu Yinxi, yes, Lu Yinxi!”
A female student exclaimed “ao ao”: “That’s my idol!”
On the day of the piano donation, Lu Yinxi flew from Beijing to Shanghai to sign and confirm at the Red Cross.
The Red Cross staff asked, “Would you like to go to the hospital for a commemorative photo?”
She shook her head and smiled, “That’s a place for treating patients and saving lives. I won’t disturb the medical order. Just deliver the piano for me.”
In another week, it would be the Lunar New Year.
After meeting Jian Qing a few times, they were separated due to work and had been chatting online.
That “stuffy gourd” (a reserved person) could hardly squeeze out a few words, and it was almost always her initiating different topics.
This time, back in Shanghai, Lu Yinxi invited Jian Qing to see the snow at the Lake Heart Pavilion in the university town.
Last year, in that virtual world, Jian Qing had promised her to pick lychees from the school trees for her in summer and take her to see the snow at Lake Heart Pavilion in winter.
The current Jian Qing had completely forgotten the promises made before, so Lu Yinxi had to fulfill them herself.
The biting wind was sharp and cold, and the sky, clouds, mountains, and water were all white, above and below.
Jian Qing had already been standing in the center of the pavilion, waiting for Lu Yinxi’s arrival.
During the winter break, students had gone home, leaving the surroundings a vast expanse of whiteness devoid of people, which she didn’t particularly like.
Yet she couldn’t pinpoint why she disliked the snowy landscape.
For some inexplicable reason, she had come to dislike it.
When did this dislike begin?
“Teacher Jian, I’m here!” Lu Yinxi, wrapped in a coat, appeared before Jian Qing, her nose tip red from the cold.
“Why did you ask to meet here?” Jian Qing pulled Lu Yinxi closer, shielding her from the cold wind rushing in from all directions.
“Because you promised me in a dream to bring me to see the snow at Lake Heart Pavilion. Also, I want to tell you many, many things.”
Lake Heart Pavilion was the first scenery they had seen after understanding each other’s feelings, and it was here that Jian Qing had made her first promise.
“What do you want to say?” Jian Qing cupped Lu Yinxi’s hands, gently rubbing them.
Lu Yinxi looked into Jian Qing’s eyes and said earnestly, “I want to talk to you about my future plans. I don’t have particularly lofty ambitions. I just want to spend a life plain and peaceful, safe and stable with my loved ones and family. I’m 25 this year. I’ll act for another five years, and when I’m 30, I’ll retire from the entertainment industry. After retiring, firstly, I want to study abroad, learning what I’m interested in, be it STEM or humanities and social sciences. Secondly, I want to film a medical documentary. Thirdly, I want to marry you.”
Jian Qing was stunned: “Ma-marry?”
Lu Yinxi’s eyes reddened as she looked into Jian Qing’s eyes and softly confessed, “Yes, marry. Although you’ve forgotten, you once asked me about my plans for the future. I’ve kept it all in my heart, and now I can say it out loud — I love you, I don’t want to leave you, I want to spend a lifetime with you. If you agree, I’ll take you home for the New Year this year.”
The author has something to say:
Jian (inhaling): Getting married without even dating?
Lu (sighing): To be honest, we’ve been living together for a year already.
We’re approaching the grand finale! This ending shouldn’t feel too rushed, right? _(:з」∠)_ For the next book, I’ll first fill in that online game plot hole I’ve been practicing with, probably a free short story of a few ten thousand words. Then I’ll consider whether to write about the pre-ordered mental illness theme or the desert island survival theme. Actually, I also want to write an ancient crime investigation story, with the CP (couple) tentatively set as a coroner and an imperial guard. But my writing skills might not be up to par yet, so I’ll keep honing my plot-writing abilities. I also have ideas for a xianxia (immortal heroes), quick transmigration, supernatural stories, and more. We’ll take it slow~~~
Author is really modest, the writing esp emotions is top tier